Russia Turns to New-Generation Drones and All-Day Attacks to Wear Down Ukrainians

Listen, do you think I enjoy sounding like a broken record! Well do you!

Putin will not stop till he gets the Donbas, their oil and mineral rights. Ukraine is putting up a noble fight but in the end, Vlad will keep up the drilling until he get what he's after. He's unconcerned with his or their body count.

Russia Turns to New-Generation Drones and All-Day Attacks to Wear Down Ukrainians

Kyiv struggles to adapt to continuous attacks using faster drones that are harder to intercept

By Anastasiia Malenko and Alistair MacDonald, WSJ

Aug. 31, 2026 11:04 am ET

Russia is targeting Kyiv with nearly continuous airstrikes using a growing fleet of faster, jet-powered Geran drones.

Russia is trying to pound Ukraine’s capital into submission by using its growing fleet of jet-powered drones for nearly continuous attacks, combining improved weaponry with new tactics.

Jet-powered Geran drones, an evolution of the Iranian Shahed model, are stretching Ukraine’s air defenses with their speed. Since last Thursday, piecemeal Russian airstrikes around the clock have replaced periodic massive barrages at night.

Air-raid alerts throughout the day are threatening to make normal life in Kyiv more difficult than at any time since the early weeks of the war, when the Russian army reached the capital’s suburbs. For days, the city’s residents have barely had a break from wailing sirens, the buzzing of overhead drones, dashes to air-raid shelters, and explosions.

The rise of jet-powered drones marks a new stage in Russia’s war on Ukrainian cities. By this summer, the air defenses around Kyiv and other cities were often shooting down around 90% of older, propeller-driven Geran models, often using cheap interceptor drones.

Ukraine’s air force hasn’t yet released data showing how many jet-powered drones it is intercepting. But Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, told The Wall Street Journal that a higher share of jet-powered drones are reaching their targets than of propeller-powered versions. In some attacks, up to two-thirds of the Gerans—the name Russia uses for Shaheds—used in Moscow’s attacks are now jet-powered, he said.

“Right now, Russia’s tactic is to wear down Ukraine and Ukrainians—first and foremost, our people,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday.

Russia is also firing a steady flow of ballistic and cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.

Over four days beginning on Thursday, Russia launched 1,500 long-range drones against Ukraine, of which around 800 were jet-powered, Zelensky said.

Several defense-technology companies are working on a new generation of interceptors to counter the threat and bring the interception rate back to over 90%, he said.

Russia is also firing a steady flow of ballistic and cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities, with the former particularly hard to stop because Ukraine is short of Patriot antimissile interceptors. The combined airstrikes are targeting everything from military and civilian factories to energy infrastructure and the warehouses of grocery chains and other retailers.

The strikes have killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in recent months. On Friday evening, a jet-powered drone struck an ammunition depot in a Kyiv suburb, killing 38 people and injuring dozens more.

Moscow has expanded its strategic bombing campaign against cities while its army struggles on the front line. Russian forces have advanced very little in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region this year despite significant casualties, and have lost some ground to Ukrainian counterattacks in the country’s south.

Adding jet engines to Geran drones turns them into less-sophisticated cruise missiles, allowing them to reach speeds of around 300 miles an hour—roughly three times the speed of older versions of the Shahed-type drone.

In recent days, Kyiv residents have tried to keep going about their business. But the interruptions from air-raid alerts have been constant. Public transit has become unpredictable, especially because bridges have been closed during attacks. Taxis, increasingly in demand, have raised prices.

Many business meetings have moved to underground parking garages. Evening concerts have moved to subway stations. Many grocery stores and restaurants have been opening and closing repeatedly throughout the day because of the alerts. At night, uninterrupted sleep has become a luxury.

“Because this is happening nonstop and it’s putting a strain on all of these things—the transportation infrastructure, supplies, food, and other necessary items—it’s become difficult to plan the workweek”, said Milena Khomchenko, 28, who lives in Kyiv and works as an art critic. Underlying stress about the attacks and the winter ahead has lately prompted bouts of insomnia until 4 a.m., while sleep deprivation has made work more difficult for her this summer.

“It has become consistently impossible to plan anything,” she said.

Ukrainian combat aircraft, including F-16s, are going after the jet-powered drones. Portable surface-to-air missiles and fixed-site air defense batteries are also helping.

The air force has some drones that can take down the latest Gerans, a Ukrainian government official said—but it only has hundreds of them, whereas it needs thousands.

“We have to increase the speed of interceptors and the altitude they can work at,” to match the new jet-powered drones, said Oleksiy Komlichenko, chief business development officer at Noctis, a Ukrainian defense-technology company.

Noctis is working on an updated, faster version of its propeller-driven Zirka interceptor drone, which it hopes will enter service within weeks. It is also developing a jet-powered version, which will take longer.

Russia first began to use Shahed-type drones in the fall of 2022 as a cheap way to flood Ukraine’s air defenses and allow costlier, more powerful missiles to get through. By summer 2025, Russia was using hundreds of the drones at a time in nighttime salvos. Their slow speed, though, made them relatively easy to shoot down.

Russia has been mixing in jet-powered Gerans since late last year. But the numbers of the new variants have shot up since July, and they are becoming the backbone of Russia’s long-range drone campaign.

When Russia launched 101 mostly jet-powered Gerans on Aug. 6, Ukraine’s air force shot down only 65% of them, the lowest interception rate this year, according to the Centre for Information Resilience, a U.K.-based open-source investigations group.

The jet-powered Gerans are more expensive than earlier versions. Russia has reduced the total number of drones used in its attacks as it invests more resources into the newer models, Ukrainian officials have said.